Mamma Gógó

Just got back from a wonderful visit to Iceland! On the flight over I saw one Icelandic film that was very boring, so no review. On the way back I managed to squeeze in two films, the first one was Mamma Gógó by Friðrik Þór Friðriksson. I am quite a fan of Friðrik Þór, having had the good luck to have met him at the Nordic Film Festival in Lübeck many years ago. I had seen his Children of Nature (Börn náttúrunnar) and was so impressed with it, I wrote an article for Nordeuropaforum in 1992 about Icelandic films in general. 

Anyway, Friðrik Þór has quite a sense of humor and includes lots of little jokes in his movies. In Mamma Gógó he starts out referring to Börn náttúrunnar and so you immediately see that the director in the film is none other than Friðrik Þór himself, with a bit of poetic license.

The story is mostly about the mother of the unnamed director (played by Hilmir Snær Guðnason), Gógó, who is succumbing to Alzheimer's disease. The mother is so wonderfully played by Kristbjörg Kjeld (isl) and I spent some time wondering how Friðrik Þór managed to find an actress to play Gógó as a young woman in the black-and-white flashbacks. Imagine my surprise to understand the joke when I started reading up on the film and participants when I got home: Kristbjörg herself played the role of Gógó in a 1962 film 79 af stöðinni (isl, film is on YouTube, english title is "The Girl Gogo"). And the actor playing Gógó's dead husband in the newer film, is none other than Gunnar Eyjólfsson, who played the taxi driver who falls in love with Gógó in that film (which also caused a bit of a kerfluffle in the USA about the way the US soldiers stationed at Keflavík were portrayed, but that is another story). No wonder there was such a similarity between the young actors and the elderly ones: they were played by the same people, just 47 years later!

There are other little jokes in the film, which was filmed in 2009, just after the kreppa, the world-wide economic crash. One has to do with deCode, an Icelandic company that sequenced genetic material for about 2/3 of the Icelandic population, then went bankrupt and sold the data to a company in the US. The director invests money he obtains from selling his mother's apartment in this company, losing his investment. Bank people are, shall we say, not portrayed in a good light :) Another is how Gógó manages to escape losing her licence for drunk driving, she has the director's son in the back seat, she is bringing him home from the hospital where she took him after she discovered that he had drunk a lot of alcohol. When she fails the breathalyzer test, she suggests it is broken and it should be tested on the boy. He, too, displays a high alcohol content, so the police figure that the device is broken and let her drive on home. And of course the final joke is that all of Friðrik Þór's films have to have pissing scenes in them. This time it is a woman, Gógó, getting her diaper changed by her son, a very touching scene.

It is a thought-provoking film about getting old and having to deal with a parent who has Alzheimer's. The film should have attracted much more attention than it did, even if some of the jokes escape a non-Icelandic audience. If you find it streamed somewhere: watch it!